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Inequality in school suspensions, cntd.

Inequality in school suspensions, cntd.

What is the impact of the unequal suspension rates faced by Black schoolchildren? Many educators, social scientists, lawyers and legal scholars, and community and civil rights activists are arguing that overly punitive, and racially unequal school discipline is putting students on a “school to prison pipeline”, or “schoolhouse to jailhouse”. Consider the following examples:

1. As reported in the New York Times [7], in 2010, an “oldschool” fistfight in a North Carolina schoolyard that did not involve weapons or serious injuries led to the arrest and suspension of several students. Several students were suspended not just for a week, but for the entire semester. Additionally, they were told they could not attend an alternative school, and were also denied aid to study at home. The girls have sued, and their lawyers are arguing that denying an entire semester of schooling is unconstitutional.

2. As reported at rethinkingschools.org [8], a zero tolerance policy led to the arrest and transfer of a 5th grader: “Robert was an 11-year-old in 5th grade who, in his rush to get to school on time, put on a dirty pair of pants from the laundry basket. He did not notice that his Boy Scout pocketknife was in one of the pockets until he got to school. He also did not notice that it fell out when he was running in gym class. When the teacher found it and asked whom it belonged to, Robert volunteered that it was his, only to find himself in police custody minutes later. He was arrested, suspended, and transferred to a disciplinary school.”

3. As reported at rethinkingschools.org [9], Latino students also face harsh discipline: “Jose Gallego’s story is a case in point. The 23-year-old explained: “I’m a high school dropout. I was supposed to graduate in 2008, but I missed a few days of school because my parents were going through a hard time. They kicked me out of school. So, then I started selling CDs downtown. I was arrested for selling CDs, I was locked up, and I got out with a whole different perspective. I never had been in juvenile detention. I didn’t know what to do. I started selling drugs. Now I’m lost. I’ve got a little brother and a little sister, they don’t look up to me anymore. I’m a two-time convicted felon. It’s hard for me to get a job.”

We can see the schoolhouse to jailhouse trajectory here. Critical in all three cases is the involvement of law enforcement, resulting in arrests and potentially a criminal record at a young age. As reported by The Advancement Project (see video below),

students in Florida have been arrested for throwing a lollipop (charge: "battery”) and tapping a pencil on a desk (charge: “destruction of property”). The pervasive and excessive involvement of law enforcement to regulate children’s behavior in schools creates an environment where the smallest deviations are seen as requiring police intervention. As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, things look like nails. Many schools recreate the physical environment of prisons with metal detectors, searches and a heavy police presence in the hallway. When children are arrested, kept out of school through suspension, transferred or expelled, their opportunities to learn are jeopardized, which then puts them on course for greater risk of criminal activities. Research has shown that high school dropouts, particularly among Black males, are much more likely to become incarcerated. And, a criminal record devastates opportunities for employment and future productivity. Indeed, sociologist Devah Pager has shown that while a criminal record strongly reduces male job applicant’s chances for obtaining a job, it is particularly bad for Black men. In fact, her employment audit study showed that Black men without a criminal record were less likely to receive callbacks from employers than White men with a criminal record [10]. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander contends that the massive incarceration of Black men in the United States constitutes “The New Jim Crow” [11]; a new racial caste system in which convicted men are stripped of many of the basic rights and resources in this country. (see one of her speeches below).

Therefore, the school to prison pipeline is so named because for many Black students, their experiences at school are preparing them for entry into prisons and the criminal justice system, not for educational achievement, a college degree, fulfilling careers, and financial success. We noted earlier that U.S. schools are no longer legally segregated, so they are not “separate” in the same way as before Brown v. Board. However, that does not mean schools are now integrated. Many schools remain just as segregated as decades ago. Most children must attend the school that is located in their neighborhood. And because most U.S. cities and neighborhoods remain highly segregated by race, that results in segregated schools as well. The dissimilarity index is an index used by social scientists to measure segregation. It ranges from 0 to 100, with 0 meaning no segregation at all and 100 meaning total segregation. The index tells us the percentage of people of one race that would need to move in order to create equal representation of both races throughout the city. Values of 60 or more are considered high. For example, a Black-White dissimilarity index of 60 means that 60% of the Black people in the city would need to move to obtain even spatial representation. Below are dissimilarity measures for Black and White children in 2000 and 2010, in metropolitan areas across the U.S [12]. Metropolitan area here means a large geographic area, not just the city itself. For example, the metro area for New York City is not just the 5 boroughs, but includes the suburbs in Westchester and Long Island, and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut as well.

As can be seen, Black and White children in all these cities are highly segregated, with little improvement from 2000 to 2010. In fact, census data consistently show that segregation levels have not declined much in this country over the past 20 or 30 years. For that reason, most schools in those cities are segregated as well. Taken together, segregation levels and inequalities in suspension rates mean that U.S. public schools today continue to reflect the 1968 Kerner Commission’s admonition that “the U.S. is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.”

References

[1] Beeman, R. (2010). The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution. New York: Penguin.